Kinship, Organisations and 'Wannabes': Aboriginal Identity Negotiation in South-Western Sydney (Report‪)‬

This paper explores Aboriginal identity negotiation in south-western Sydney. Despite the fact that more than sixty per cent of Aboriginal people now live in urban contexts (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006), identity among Aboriginal people in the city has attracted little academic interest. The primacy of identity based on kinship ties associated with place of origin has been emphasized in anthropological research. As well, continent-wide Aboriginal commonality and pan-Aboriginality developed through urban Aboriginal activism have also been documented. However, the relationship between these variously achieved identities has rarely been examined. This paper investigates how some different ways of establishing Aboriginal identity have interacted with each other among urban Aboriginal residents in southwestern Sydney. Morgan (2006:139) states that Aboriginality is 'constructed and reconstructed in the shifting social and political conditions of post-war Australia'. How this process of construction and reconstruction of Aboriginality is experienced in relation to the ambiguous and dynamic social relations in south-western Sydney will be discussed and analysed. In anthropological research, Aboriginal identity has been seen as primarily based on kinship ties associated with the person's place of origin. In rural areas, in closely knit communities such as missions, reserves, or settlements, from which most current urban Aboriginal residents originally came, Aboriginal people developed a strong sense of identity as 'Aborigines' based on kinship ties and a shared history of painful and oppressive contact with the dominant non-Aboriginal society (e.g. Fink 1957; Morris 1988). The situational differences between one region and the next resulted in 'many localised groups of Aborigines, each with its own regional focus, and consequently, in many different identities' (Berndt 1977: 8). Anthropological studies undertaken in Melbourne (Barwick 1964, 1988[1971]), Adelaide (Gale 1972, 1981; Gale and Wundersitz 1982; Inglis 1961, 1964; Schwab 1988) and Brisbane (Smith and Biddle 1975) reveal that localized kinship ties continue to shape Aboriginal people's primary social relations after they move to the city, where they encounter Aboriginal people who are not connected to them either by kinship ties or by place of origin. A similar trend has been observed in inner-city Sydney (Staveley 1993), although there are no detailed ethnographic studies focusing specifically on Aboriginal social relations other than kinship ties.